Click fraud is a type of internet crime that occurs in pay-per-click online advertising when a person, automated script, or computer program, imitating a legitimate user of a web browser, clicks on an advertisement on a web page, for the purpose of generating a charge per click to the advertiser without having actual interest in the targeted advertisement. Click fraud has been the subject of increasing number of controversies and litigations due to the growing roles of the internet as an advertising platform, a market place and an information repository.
Advertisement is one type of content that is most susceptible to click fraud. Inflated stats on advertisements can hurt revenue for ad providers because the ad providers are forced to overpay for their advertising as a result of competitors artificially boosting the number of clicks on their advertisements. E-commence websites also suffer from click fraud in terms of buyer and seller reputations. A loss of confidence in the trust system provided by an e-marketplace will lead to diminished user satisfaction and ultimately reduced revenue for the operator of the website. Click fraud can also cause a decrease in the quality of service provided by online rating systems that recommend content or other websites to its users. If the ratings of the content items are artificially manipulated as a result of click fraud, the recommendation made based on those ratings will no longer be accurate. This leads to reduced click through on content items, loss of user confidence in the service and, ultimately, financial losses to the service provider.
Currently, there are a number of click fraud prevention solutions offered by different companies. For example, Ad Watcher offers a suite of click fraud monitoring tools that help detect and prevent fraudulent activity. Click Forensics combines the technical, behavioral and market attributes of an advertiser's online campaigns to monitor and detect click fraud. Authentic Click identifies, verifies and documents sources of fraud, and calculates the amount of advertising dollars spent on invalid clicks to be refunded to advertisers. Click Lab provides click fraud audits for advertisers and publishers. Finally, Think Partnership allows advertisers to bid on click-fraud protected keywords.
These existing click fraud solutions are primarily customized for advertising and publishing companies. The mechanisms used by these solutions include detecting the occurrences of one or more of the following signs of click fraud: abnormal number of clicks from the same IP address, a sudden increase in the number of visitors from countries to which the advertisement is not targeted to; visitors who leave the site too quickly; a sudden increase in activity for specific keyword in an ad campaign for no apparent reason, and an unusual increase in website traffic.
The problems with these existing approaches are that they rely on identifying and blocking dangerous IP addresses. Invariably, this happens after the fact that the clicks have already been recorded and content or recommendation systems already contaminated and does not protect a service from future abuse. These systems also fail to take into account consumer intelligence such as user profiles and are unable to identify suspicious users until these users have already successfully committed click fraud. The present invention provides a solution to overcome these shortcomings of the existing systems.